But thus far, Beverly Crusher had been able to guarantee the real identity of all senior staff involved in the impending attempt.
Over the past week, ever since the Enterprise had been brought here, she had scanned each crew member, ostensibly to check health—an activity the overseers did not object to, as it also served their purpose. Then, with a sharp sliver of composite she had snapped from the tricorder's shell, Beverly had surreptitiously given each crew member she had scanned and confirmed as being from this universe a small, triangular wound.
Those whose last names fell within the last half of the standard alphabet had a small tear on their left hands. Those whose names fell within the first half of the alphabet were similarly marked on the right hand. Names beginning with vowels brought the wound to the palm, close to the fleshy base of the thumb. Initial consonants meant the wound was made near the knuckle of the little finger.
At the beginning of the identification procedure, if the overseers, for whatever reason, had asked to check the hands of the Enterprise crew members, there would be no one distinctive mark that might give the scheme away. By now, only days later, those identifying wounds were hidden among the other abrasions and tears that had come from seven days of intense physical labor.
So far, eight crew members had disappeared after collapsing for the fourth and final time. And Beverly had identified six counterparts who had been switched for their duplicates. For Picard, that meant twenty-one crew had been lost so far, and he felt each death or disappearance as a personal attack.
Beset by pain, mouth sour with the ghastly broth, Picard faced this day knowing that Gul Rutal would pay for what she had done to his crew. And the Cardassian's accomplices would share her fate.
A jarring blast of noise rent the air, making Picard jerk in response. It was time for the next shift. His shift.
The last shift, he thought as he stood up, willing himself to dismiss the stiffness of his legs.
He noted and set aside the concern Beverly wore. "Are you sure you're up to this, Jean-Luc? You haven't missed a shift yet. I could have you relieved."
Picard took her hand, thinking of all the other times he had done so, when other matters had been on both their minds. "They have my ship, Beverly. I am going to get it back."
That, Picard knew, was the end of it.
He turned to face the narrow passageway between the cots, waiting for the next blast of sound that would signal it was time to march.
Beverly stood aside.
The scream of the shift-commencement signal echoed in the confined barracks. Picard's ear canals throbbed and popped as the pressure seal on the barracks airlock was unsealed. He heard the metallic rumble as the large disks of metal that were the inner and outer doors of the Cardassianstyle airlock rolled to the side, opening the barracks to what lay outside. He could smell the hot, sulfurous blast of outside air as it rolled in, potent enough to eclipse the ever-present stench of stale sweat and human waste.
"Any word of Deanna or Data?" Picard asked quickly.
He saw Beverly shake her head.
Picard could understand why the overseers had removed Deanna from the main population of prisoners. With her Betazoid ability to detect falsehood in most beings, she could easily have identified those counterparts who had infiltrated Picard's crew. But he had no idea why Data had been taken, unless it was to examine the technology that had given birth to him.
The barracks filled with lines of workers, the prisoners marching rhythmically in file along the paths between the cots, between the waste buckets left at each corner, continuing on to the outside and the new day's labor.
Picard squinted as he stepped outside. But not because the sun was bright.
There was no sun in the sky.
The sky itself was on fire, glaringly incandescent with the plasma storms of the Goldin Discontinuity.
To the left, Picard perceived that a new ion formation had filled the horizon—an enormous blue billow of swirling light, embedded with hidden points of light, like spotlights seen through heavy rainfall.
Ahead, and to the right, past the low structures of the other barracks, warring clouds of red and blue still collided like monstrous stormfronts. The other barracks, if that was the function that all the other buildings shared, were all the same in appearance—low, circular structures of rough-finished, rust-colored metal, arranged in a large circle with a single, double-height building at the center. That structure was the overseers' command station, bristling with sensor dishes and antenna masts, and linked with all the other buildings by a network of raised plasteel walkways and platforms intended to keep the prisoners and guards from ever having to risk making contact with the asteroid's metal surface. Even with the discharge suits, the likelihood of plasma induction was appreciable.
Picard had no doubt that the vista he saw was millions of kilometers distant on all sides. And under any other conditions, he would find the vividly colored, almost blinding sight wondrous, exactly the reason he had first ventured into space to see, record, and understand.
But he had no use for wonder here.
Not when the view directly overhead was so abysmal, so soul-crushing, so inescapable.
There was no doubt in Picard that the site of the prison camp he and his crew had been brought to was an asteroid that had never known life. The slick surface was of nickeliron. Hard and unyielding. Uneven except where plasteel walkways had been laid between the barracks and the work staging areas.
From the distinctive curve of the horizon, La Forge had calculated the asteroid's diameter as no more than fifteen kilometers. Somewhere beneath them in the mines, he'd reasoned, an artificial-gravity generator must be keeping all the workers in place, and maintaining their atmosphere.
La Forge had also pointed out that a certain percentage of asteroids did not exist as single bodies. And this asteroid was obviously among them.
Because, no more than two kilometers straight overhead, a second asteroid of equal size hung in chilling counterbalance. Its natural gravity would not affect the body on which the prison camp existed, though the feeling of inescapable pressure from its presence was so powerful that its effect was enervating on the spirits of those who toiled below.
To look up to what should have been open sky—where, evolution and experience had ingrained in the mind of every member of Picard's crew, unbounded freedom would be found—there was only a flying mountain of rock, impossibly poised, as if mere seconds from completing its deadly descent.
Day after day it had weighed upon the prisoners from the Enterprise, until even Picard acknowledged it was one of the most depressing sights he had ever encountered.
He had not been alone in his response.
Riker, too, had said he felt he was no more than a bug beneath a boot, the remainder of his life inconsequential, measured in seconds.
Beverly had refused to look up, believing it was a psychological ploy on the part of their captors—a ploy with which she would not cooperate.
And La Forge, whose ocular implants had replaced his VISOR, and who now could see even farther into realms beyond the sensitivities of ordinary human vision, had detected and reported on the rivers of shifting energy that stretched between the bleak landscape of the prison asteroid, and the overbearing mass that hung above their heads.
He had identified the energy wavelengths as a forcefield— something of such power that it kept the asteroids linked in tandem, as well as maintaining a column of breathable atmosphere from one asteroid to the next. Why an atmosphere was necessary for the second asteroid was still a question to be answered. A large grid of sensor dishes and thick cables could be seen on its surface, directly overhead, but no prisoners were ever sent there for maintenance or construction work. Riker had assumed it was either a power-generating facility, or the artificial-gravity facility that kept the two asteroids connected.
La Forge had told Picard that he viewed the invisible field as a glass column linking the two chunks of lifeless me
tal and stone.
And, more significant to Picard, La Forge had recognized at once the safeguards that had been built in.
Should any prisoner, or group of prisoners, ever decide to attack their overseers by disabling the power generators that kept them imprisoned, the end result would be an explosive loss of atmosphere, coupled with the slow but inevitable drawing together of the two asteroids, until everything between them—prison camp included—was crushed.
The forcefield La Forge saw was not keeping the two rocks together, it was keeping them apart.
The ultimate deterrent to escape.
After two days of carefully considered study and analysis, Picard chose to ignore the threat of the second asteroid. Instead, he focused all his efforts on the even more unusual body which hung halfway between the two asteroids.
A kilometer above the prison-camp asteroid, sparkling with the actinic flicker of fusion torches used in its construction, was a device as large as any spacedock, though of a completely different, even alien configuration. It seemed to be composed of rectangular panels of dull copper metal— ten meters by fifteen meters on a side, La Forge had confirmed. Each panel was suspended within a weblike framework of fine cables and metal rods, making the device seem almost transparent, as if it had been built as a child's construction toy.
But the structure, no matter what the style of its construction, was clearly a device.
Because beside it, in stationkeeping alignment, hung the Enterprise.
Which meant the device's purpose was not difficult to divine.
When Picard had first seen it, the fragile-appearing framework of metal panels and delicate cables was easily large enough to contain the Voyager. And he knew at once it was the means by which the duplicate Voyager had crossed to this universe.
Since Picard's arrival, evidence of construction on the crossover device was undeniable. By holding his fingers up at arm's length, and sighting through one eye, he had been able to see that where once the structure had been as long as three fingers were wide, it was now as long as five. In a day or two, its length would have almost doubled beyond its original dimensions, and the Enterprise was almost twice as long as the Voyager.
Picard had no doubt that when the crossover device was doubled, when it was long enough to contain his ship, then his ship would be stolen from this universe, and used in the other.
That was why today was the day.
He would not, could not, allow that to happen.
Not to his ship.
"Delta shift! Form work details!"
The guttural command issued forth from a delta-shift overseer. Krawl. A Klingon, young, with a flat look of total disinterest behind his eyes.
Picard had seen Krawl slap an agonizer against the neck of a woman who had dared to stop to catch her breath, with as much emotion as he might expend to brush an insect from his shoulder.
Picard kept his head down as he shuffled to the platform with the other twenty-three workers who made up his detail. If today was like every other, he would be sent down into the mines to physically transfer ore from an antigrav conveyor to a hopper bin.
From what he had been able to piece together from Riker and the others during shift changes—the only time the scattered crew of the Enterprise could find a few moments to talk—the hopper was routed to a fusion kiln. Like the mines, the hopper was also underground, where, under conditions of nightmarish heat, the nickel-iron ore was transmuted by a crude replication technology and extruded into the panels and support trusses used in the crossover device overhead. There were other assembly facilities elsewhere, Picard knew, perhaps even on the other asteroid, where circuitry and power couplings were assembled. But thus far, no one from the Enterprise had been assigned to those crucial jobs.
From this asteroid, a gravity-tether elevator lifted the construction materials to the crossover device. And it was on the tether platforms that Picard and his gold team would reach the Enterprise, while the red and blue teams, respectively, neutralized the guards and took over the power-generation facilities.
If not for the prospect of failure, Picard would have looked forward to the challenge before him.
His team would be launching cables from the crossover device to the hull of the Enterprise— essentially, affixing grappling lines as if they were a seventeenth-century boarding party.
Provided his team could cross the lines quickly enough and reach the Enterprise's outer hull, the entry codes for the airlocks were all mechanically set, specifically to guard against a computer failure making it possible to lock crew in environmental suits outside the ship.
Five minutes, Picard told himself as he stood with the others of his detail. Five minutes and the ship would be his again, or she would be cycling toward an unstoppable warpcore breach.
One way or another, the Enterprise would be his.
Or it would be no one's.
"Prisoner Delta 06-13-40, step away from the platform. Now!"
Only when a nearby fellow prisoner pushed Picard forward did he realize, startled, that the serial-number designation was his own.
The delta-shift overseer stood before Picard, his own discharge suit covered by nonconductive armor. Krawl whacked an agonizer probe against one massive thigh as if the probe were a riding crop.
Picard remained motionless, head down, seething with anger, yet unwilling to provoke any escalation of response from the Klingon.
"Hard of hearing, Delta 06-13-40?"
Picard did not raise his head, aware that eye contact between prisoner and overseer was considered provocation, "No, Overseer."
Then Picard gasped as the agonizer probe bit into his neck, making his vision explode with red bursts of light. He dropped to his knees, fiercely suppressing his impulse to shove the probe down Krawl's throat.
"Look at me when I speak to you," the overseer said. "Is your hearing damaged?"
Picard raised his head. His neck throbbed with pain, but he managed to look into the overseer's large dark eyes. "No, Overseer," he rasped.
And then he barely had time to close his eyes in a reflexive act of self-preservation as Krawl's probe slashed across his face, knocking him off the plasteel platform to the hard metal of the asteroid's surface.
"How dare you look me in the eye," the overseer roared.
Picard pictured his hands closing around Krawl's neck. He pictured his thumbs ensuring that the Klingon would never see anything again.
But for the sake of his crew, for his ship, Picard did nothing.
Someone else did.
Who it was, Picard wasn't certain. An ensign from belowdecks, he knew. Someone in astrometrics. A young man with a full life before him.
But who didn't know how to follow orders. "Not" the ensign shouted as he launched himself from the platform in defense of his captain.
"Ensign, stop!" Picard commanded.
But the young ensign collided with the overseer, forcing the Klingon back with a flurry of useless punches directed against his armored stomach.
Picard saw what was to happen and was powerless to stop it—there was just no time.
As if wielding a bat'leth, Krawl swiftly flipped his agonizer probe into the air above the ensign, then drove it down with unerring accuracy into the unprotected back of his neck.
The ensign's scream was immediate.
His arms and legs shook uncontrollably and he collapsed face-first on the plasteel platform.
Picard was on his feet at once, and lunged for the ensign. The plan meant nothing, now. The safety of his crew, everything.
"Leave him alone!" Picard ordered the Klingon. He used his own body to shield the half-conscious ensign. "He's young. He didn't know what he was—"
Krawl's boot caught Picard in the face, sent him sprawling.
But only death could keep a starship captain from his mission.
Picard rolled to his feet, crouched to attack Krawl even as the Klingon grabbed the back of the ensign's discharge suit and effortlessly hauled the
young man to his feet.
"Don't harm him," Picard warned.
Krawl looked amused. "I won't do anything," he said. Then he jerked his powerful forearm so rapidly that the series of suit connectors running along the ensign's back split open like a chain stitch unraveling.
Picard blanched in horror, knowing what the overseer was planning. He started forward again.
But the Klingon raised his agonizer probe toward Picard, and the inducer tips on it sparked with blue energy.
"Don't be a hero, Terran. It's set to kill."
The ensign was on his feet, dazed, barely able to stand as Krawl held Picard at bay with his agonizer and ripped off the rest of the discharge suit.
"Don't do this," Picard said. "He'll learn his lesson." The words caught in his throat even as he said them. "He'll be a good worker."
Krawl snarled at Picard as the last of the ensign's discharge suit fell away, leaving him in Starfleet-issue shorts and undershirt. "Trust me, Terran, he'll make an even better example."
Then the Klingon kicked the ensign savagely, sending him flying from the walkway to the asteroid's surface.
The asteroid's conductive surface.
Picard had had enough. He threw himself forward.
But four hands grabbed him from behind and he twisted to see that two other overseers—one Klingon, one Cardassian— had him in their grip.
"No . . ." Picard protested.
But in his heart he knew he was too late.
The ensign, alone on the asteroid's surface, pushed himself up to his feet, looked at his arms, realized his suit was gone.
He staggered from side to side, looked up at all the other prisoners, all the other overseers watching him.
His hair began to bristle as the charges built up in him. Charges that the suit would no longer bleed harmlessly away.
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